Review: The Islander by Halldór Gudmundsson

Too few people have heard of the wonderful Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness, let alone read his novels such as Independent People and The Fish Can Sing.

On a visit to India, just three years after winning the 1955 Nobel Prize, his hosts, mishearing his name, announced him as Aldous Huxley - whose work Laxness had dismissed as redundant parlour twaddle.

Although his own work is anchored in a small, weatherbeaten island, "which thunders alone in the middle of the North Atlantic", it remains, to borrow another of his phrases, as "international as the birds".

Hermann Hesse and Boris Pasternak loved his novels. Karen Blixen wept over them - and the last time she had shed a tear over a book, she assured Laxness, was "before you were born".

Even Che Guevara admired him, enquiring of Atom Station: "Does it give a correct picture of life in Iceland?"

A big mouth in public, about his private life Laxness remained tight-lipped, mentioning one sister in his memoirs only once, and another sister not at all. "Nothing has ever happened to me that is worth putting into a book," he cautioned a prospective biographer.

And yet a friend observed: "Your own life is probably the most remarkable novel of all" - a claim borne out by Halldór Gudmundsson's biography.

He was born in 1902, the son of a road-builder, and grew up on a smallholding at Laxnes, 12 miles from Reykjavik, later renaming himself after the farm. This barren heathland was "perfectly connected to my own psychological state", he confessed with characteristic solipsism.

Still, he would never do "an honest physical day's work" in his life, save for eight months as a receptionist at Icelandic National Radio.

When he was seven, "and just a touch cynical", Christ appeared to him on a hill behind the farm and whispered: "When you are 17 years old you will die." This warning spurred in him "an insane passion" to write - an impulse which appears to have affected Laxness like hives, springing "from an allergy to the phenomena of the times".

Aged 13, he completed a 600-page novel, Dawn. Four years and many thousands of pages later, desperate to make his mark before the prophecy fulfilled itself, he advertised a reading in Reykjavik and charged for admission.

Surprised to find himself alive at 18, his desperation stabilised into a relentless self-belief. "I shall become a great writer in the eyes of the world or die!"

For the remainder of his 96 years, he shared Evelyn Waugh's vacillation between rebellious independent thinking and a will to submit to a higher authority. It wasn't a vacillation that made him easy to live with.

"He was no man for homework," remarks his biographer, recalling the occasion when Laxness asked his daughter where her mother was. "She went out to the clothesline." "Oh, always outside enjoying herself."

Tall and slim, scrutinising the world through a monocle that he replaced with huge glasses, the man who lopes in long strides from these pages was a bundle of touchy pride, "victorious energy" and socking ambition. "I am created from the fates of men and women, nations and entire centuries."

As a young blade in Berlin, which he found "devilishly delightful", he passed himself off as "Baron von Laxnes". Getting a woman pregnant, he disappeared for two years into a Benedictine abbey where he studied to be a monk under the name of Maurus.

Failing his maths exam, he abandoned God for Los Angeles - where he was known as Hall d'Or. "I am completely wild with power!" he wrote to his future wife, after discovering in himself an "uncontrollable calling to go to Hollywood to write 10 movies".

MGM showed interest in one of his "magnificent" scripts that "will conquer the world" - about a silent, erotic, pipe-smoking, whip-wielding woman who becomes a ship's captain, whom he imagined being played by Greta Garbo.

When the studio wanted to move the setting from Iceland to Kentucky, he threw in the towel. "Here it is not possible to do anything with genius. What they ask for is idiocy."

Disgusted by America, he became a socialist, fixing his childish faith on the Soviet Union and falling like a goose for the propaganda he was fed.

Gudmundsson discloses the blinding effects of Laxness's ambition during two long visits to Russia. His strident defence of the Moscow trials, which he attended, pales before his behaviour towards Vera Hertzsch, a friend arrested in Laxness's presence together with her one-year-old daughter.

Both perished in a labour camp, without a squeak of protest from Laxness, and there are worrying discrepancies in Laxness's account, which he kept silent for 25 years, during which time he trumpeted Stalin's teachings. "These theories made their mark on Independent People, proving that dubious doctrines can be used to produce good fiction."

Like Patrick White and William Faulkner, two other Nobel Laureates with whom he may be compared, Laxness needed to travel far from home in order to discover his subject in the "postage stamp" of his native soil. To read him is to discover an extra tastebud.

He creates a world that belongs in another dimension, like the landscape of his country - familiar, strange, seen as in a dream. It is an endearing and unforgettable voice, and we must tip our hats to Gudmundsson for setting it in context.